In recent years, there is a rapid turnover of workers for printing companies, and erroneous printing often arises from erroneous handling of information about an order received, performed by a person inexperienced in printing. In view of that, there have been developed systems for assisting operator's input of print setup information, configured to, in response to operator's operations to input order information into a corresponding input field in a setup screen, use machine learning to determine a candidate for a value to be specified in another input field together with the information and indicate the candidate in the input field in the setup screen.
For example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication (JP-A) No. 2015-176293 discloses the following information processing apparatus. The information processing apparatus includes: a display configured to display print settings recommended on the basis of print data; and one or more processors. The one or more processors are configured to, in response to receiving a change of a value for a first print setup option among the print settings on the display, use a history data of print settings used for past print processing, to determine a second print setup option to be changed together with the change of the first print setup option. The display is further configured to display a recommendation to change a value for the determined second print setup option.
However, the disclosed technique is not suitable for certain kinds of print products, such as periodicals, that can change in paper size or paper type on and after a certain month or can change in design according to the season. When obtaining a candidate for a setting value for such kind of print product by just using accumulated history data of print settings, an index used for a judgment whether to indicate the candidate (for example, one of support, confidence and lift being evaluation values used in association analysis, which indicate association between data pieces) becomes low. It may cause a problem that the apparatus does not indicate a candidate that is actually suitable for such kinds of print products.
For example, the above described JP-A No. 2015-176293 discloses the technique to, in response to a change of a value for a certain setup option among recommended print settings displayed on a display of an information processing apparatus, determine a value for another setup option to be changed together with the changed setup option, on the basis of the history data of print settings, and indicate the determined value as a recommended print setting. In this technique, a candidate value for the setup option to be changed together with the changed setup option, is obtained just by using the frequency of the use of the setting in the history data. When configuring print settings for certain kinds of print product that can change in paper size or paper type on and after a certain month or can change in design according to the season, like magazines or periodicals, the technique may cause a problem that an inappropriate candidate value is sometimes given because of the change.